Man on the Run by Tom Doyle

Author:Tom Doyle [Doyle, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857906267
Publisher: Birlinn

The mid-1970s seemed to become very intense for you . . .

Well, yeah. But we did what we set out to do. Didn’t cave in under the pressure.

9

Lift-offs and Landings

It was just after midnight when the patrol car pulled them over. They had been driving down Santa Monica Boulevard in their silver Lincoln Continental when Paul took a right turn, missing a sign forbidding the manoeuvre and running a red light. As the officer leaned into the car he caught a whiff of grass. Everyone – Paul, Linda and the three kids asleep in the back – was ordered out of the vehicle.

According to the patrolman’s report, a search of Linda’s purse produced a plastic bag containing seventeen grammes of marijuana, along with a still-smouldering joint fished out from under the passenger seat. Linda and Paul were immediately placed under arrest, before the former – probably fearing ensuing US visa problems – protested that the dope was hers and that it had been her alone, not her husband, smoking the spliff.

Paul insists to this day that the weed was planted by the police. ‘They came up with a big bag of stuff that wasn’t ours,’ he says.

Whatever the truth, the outcome was that Linda was detained for two hours while Paul drove the kids back to their rented house in Coldwater Canyon. He returned to the station where his wife was being held to discover that she had been charged with possession, her bail set at $500. Embarrassed, Paul had to confess that he was only carrying $200. In the middle of the night, he was forced to call former Apple executive director Peter Brown, who he knew was in town staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, to borrow the rest.

Worse, there was the threat that a second and more damning charge – contributing to the delinquency of a minor – might be thrown at Linda, since she’d admitted smoking weed while looking after her children. It all added to the couple’s mounting feelings of harassment. ‘We were being targeted all the time,’ Linda groaned. ‘Maybe we were asking for it. Maybe we were a bit stupid. But we’re not criminals.’

The McCartneys were in Los Angeles enjoying something of a partying lifestyle, living it up at the Beverly Wilshire (where Jo Jo Patrie noted the normally thrifty couple put no limits on the hotel tabs) before moving into the Coldwater Canyon house. There was much to celebrate. Two nights earlier, on 1 March 1975 – before an audience which included the reunited Lennon and Ono, who turned up with a tux-wearing, cocaine-emaciated David Bowie in tow – they had picked up two Grammys for Band On The Run. The album had steadily grown to become a towering success: five million copies sold, the best-selling UK album of 1974, named Album of the Year by the previously sniffy Rolling Stone, and so on and on.

Wings were in LA putting the finishing touches to the initially troubled Venus And Mars, the making of which had become far easier with the introduction of Joe English and the move to California.

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